Category: sexual assault

It’s two o’clock in the morning on Sunday, October 7th. The day after Brett Kavanaugh was sworn in as a Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.

My conscious mind got through yesterday just fine. I watched movies–had a movie marathon actually, starring one of my favorite actors–and blotted out the reality that was unfolding in the world.

But when I went to sleep, my brain betrayed me. I dreamed of being detained by corrupt police officers and of being in a situation where no one was listening to me.

And then I woke up. And here I am, at two a.m. Typing.

I’m typing because all I can think about right now is how I used to tell my boyfriend he was hurting me. And how he turned it around and made it my fault. I know now–as I should have known then–that consensual sex between two people shouldn’t hurt. Biologically, we aren’t built that way. He should have stopped when I told him he was hurting me.

But, like the senators on the Judicial Committee, he didn’t care. He heard me loud and clear, but he wanted what he wanted. He was bigger than me, stronger than me, and could get angry very, very quickly. He wanted sex, and he got it. That’s all that mattered to him.

And so, I am now left here with my memories–memories that I don’t really want to be thinking about at two a.m. Memories of a man who said he loved me, but who hurt me instead. And I carry those memories with me now into a world that has changed irrevocably. There is now an attempted rapist on the United States Supreme Court–a lifetime appointment. My lifetime.

Like this:

For me, growing up in the 1980s, rape was defined by what I saw on television–a man in black mask attacking a woman in a dark alley. It was always a stranger, a criminal, “the bad guy.”

But 72% of sexual assaults are committed by people who know the victim.

One category of this is partner rape, a much-misunderstood phenomenon that occurs when one member of a committed relationship commits sexual assault upon the other.

According to the Rape Prevention Education network of New Zealand, partner rape occurs when your spouse or partner “has sex with you without your consent.” This can mean “if you feel pressured, threatened, or coerced into participating in…sex when you don’t want to.”

I was in a relationship such as this for four years. The relationship was verbally, emotionally, and physically abusive. My partner used threats of violence and coercion to force me to have sex with him.

I did not truly realize this was rape until twenty years later.

At the time, I thought, “He always wants to have sex, and I never want to have sex. But we do it anyway.”

It was painful, but he always blamed me. I wasn’t “doing it right,” or some other nonsense. I was young and scared and believed him. After all, everything in the relationship was my fault.

The only time I had the conscious thought that I had been physically violated was when I woke up one morning and he was having sex with me. I hadn’t consented. That was clearly rape.

But I came of age in the 1980s, the era of TV rapists in black masks in dark alleys. No one ever told me my partner could rape me–such a concept didn’t exist in the early 1990s.

But now I know. Now I know that I spent four years in a relationship where I was raped dozens of times. And it has affected my life in the extreme. I am terrified of intimate relationships–after all, if the man who said he loved me and wanted to spend his life with me could treat me that way, how could I trust any other man to treat me well?

This past week has been tough. I did not watch the Kavanaugh hearings–I knew I would become too upset. I have been having vivid memories of my time with my ex-boyfriend, memories which I would rather leave buried.

But I am glad men are finally being called out for sexual assaults they perpetrated years ago. I know I will never be able to gain recourse for what happened to me, but perhaps other women can. And women like Dr. Ford, who step forward with courage and patriotism, are a role model for us all.